If there was a time when people only thought of Mexican food as fajitas, nachos and guacamole, that period is thankfully over. Today, Mexican cuisine is not only celebrated for its diversity, it’s also winning recognition on the fine-dining stage. In 2010, UNESCO recognised traditional Mexican cuisine as an Intangible Cultural Heritage and almost 15 years later, there is a confidence in Mexican fine-dining restaurants worldwide.
Recent accolades highlight this evolution. Holbox became the first Mexican restaurant to earn a Michelin star in Los Angeles, while Quintonil and Pujol in Mexico City ranked 7th and 13th respectively on the World’s 50 Best list. Both received two Michelin stars last year. Other notable restaurants include New York’s Cosme, Chicago’s Topolobampo, COME by Paco Méndez in Barcelona and Paris’ Oxte, further underscoring the global reach and popularity of Mexican cuisine.
Today, Mexican cuisine is not only celebrated for its diversity, it’s also winning recognition on the fine-dining stage
This story began in Mexico City in the late 1990s when chefs Patricia Quintana and Monica Patiño pioneered high-end Mexican cuisine with their restaurants Isote (1999) and La Taberna de León (1998), challenging the French fine-dining concepts that previously dominated. In 2000, Enrique Olvera opened Pujol, paving the way for a new culinary movement. As Jorge Vallejo, chef patron of Quintonil, remarks, ‘He [Olvera] was a trailblazer for flipping the coin to do things differently and believing in the power of Mexican gastronomy.’
Vallejo’s journey to becoming the chef behind the highest-ranked restaurant in Mexico City took him to Pujol, where he worked from 2006 to 2010. In 2012, he and his wife, Ale Vallejo, opened Quintonil and today, the restaurant’s ambitious tasting menu aims to represent the breadth of Mexico’s diverse regions, showcasing the incredible versatility of masa (the dough made from nixtamalized corn), the country’s historic relationship with insect-eating, its indigenous herbs and much more. ‘It’s not just putting super fancy ingredients on the table,’ he says. ‘We have a story to tell. We have a cultural way of eating the ingredients.’
At Quintonil, this means reflecting ‘what we breathe every day in our markets, in our houses, with our family,’ he adds. This philosophy is reflected in the menu, which features many traditional dishes and techniques, with tamal, aguachile and various moles appearing throughout the tasting menu. One of the restaurant’s signature dishes, for instance is pipián verde — a sunflower seed and herb mole with origins dating back half a millennium. The emerald elixir is pleasingly perfumed with makrut lime and Thai basil and surrounds delicate stone crab, with gossamer-thin blue corn tostadas served on top. The final savoury course, dubbed an ‘entomophagy festival,’ is a taco feast with many side dishes that showcase ingredients from Oaxaca, Yucatán, and Milpa Alta, including four different insects. For the restaurant’s signature dessert, the unique character of Melipona (stingless) bee honey is emphasised alongside Oscietra caviar and crème fraîche ice cream.
Vallejo highlights that Mexico has become a desirable tourist destination, attracting visitors with its rich cultural heritage, scenic beaches and vibrant cities, as well as its cuisine. ‘People are understanding a little bit more what it means to have a great Mexican meal,’ he says. These foundations have been crucial in raising the profile of Mexican fine dining globally and Vallejo is excited about the reinterpretations happening in other countries. For him, it’s about ‘honouring gastronomy [with] their own very, very personal point of view and what they have close by.’
This appreciation is especially evident in the Greater Los Angeles area, where 4.9m people of Mexican descent make up roughly 35-40% of the city’s population. The city is passionate about Mexican food, with Pulitzer-prize-winning journalist Jonathan Gold highlighting its taco culture. Family-run taco trucks have become staples and Angelinos have developed a keen sense of quality. When Gilberto Cetina opened Holbox in 2020, it was essential to create a connection to this culinary culture, and its location inside a modest Mexican food market in South Los Angeles makes that easier.
There’s a very strong representation of almost every regional cuisine of Mexico in Los Angeles,’ Cetina says. ‘But there’s also this really distinctive L.A. style of Mexican food.’ At Holbox, this goes further, Cetina adds, offering something ‘very uniquely South Los Angeles. Or even very uniquely Mercado La Paloma.’
Central to the Holbox dishes are hand-pressed tortillas and tostadas made from heirloom corn masa. While rooted in traditional Mexican cuisine, the novel move has been to incorporate Southern California ingredients, such as Santa Barbara sea urchin and spot prawns, which Angelinos typically associated with high-end sushi joints. Over the past 18 months, Holbox has transformed its menu and dining experience with the addition of a custom-built dry-ageing facility for fish, increasing its capacity to take produce from local fishermen and helping to expand the use of ikejime, a Japanese method of killing fish considered both the most humane and best for quality.
The results are striking. Highlights include the delicately sweet, raw deepwater Kauai shrimp aguachile; the scallop ceviche topped with Santara Barbara sea urchin; bluefin tostada; and arguably the star of the show, a kampachi taco that makes use of the fish’s head and collar meat, based on a smoked marlin taco from Northern Mexico. Using local kampachi instead, its scraps are smoked and then simmered with chilies and herbs into a thick guisado paste, before folding it into a blue-corn taco with melting, locally made Oaxacan cheese, fresh tomato salsa cruda, and Veracruz-style peanut salsa matcha.
‘I think we’ve been moving closer towards creating a style of cooking that can be identified as “oh, that’s Holbox”,’ Cetina suggests, which this dish reflects. Holbox is no ordinary Michelin-star restaurant and what it represents is a style of high-end Mexican cuisine that stays true to the spirit of the city’s Mexican foodscapes.
In London, where knowledge of Mexican cuisine had partially been reduced to hyper-kitsch restaurants, and fast-food burrito joints like Chilango, Chipotle and Taco Bell, Kol wasn’t exactly opened to build on an existing tradition.
‘I wanted to have this destination restaurant, so I needed a destination city as well,’ says the restaurant’s chef and founder Santiago Lastra. ‘London ticked all the boxes of what I wanted to do.’
Lastra’s culinary journey was globe-trotting, cooking in 27 countries, and building an impressive CV, including Mugaritz, where he learned the importance of texture and temperature as ingredients, and Noma, where he embraced natural, seasonal ingredients and fermentation. Hew was part of the team behind Noma’s pop-up in Tulum, Mexico.
The restaurant opened in 2020 and its philosophy centres on crafting dishes that evoke the flavours of Mexico while incorporating local British ingredients. Kol has increased its restrictions on imported ingredients, with corn and capsicums the only Mexican ingredients used there today.
Its signature dish is a Scottish langoustine dressed in a razor-sharp smoked chilli and sea buckthorn sauce, and served on a nixtamalized corn tortilla, with the head alongside to squeeze on extra umami depth. It’s mesmerising but for a while Lastra was unsatisfied with other parts of the menu. Reflecting on the challenges of menu development, he shares that ‘we did around 120 dishes,’ and in the end, ‘only five dishes made it to the menu.’
By connecting with Mexico’s ancient culinary traditions and creatively adapting to their local environments, all three chefs are forging a path for Mexican cuisine
Kol’s concept was always strong but the current tasting menu reveals this meticulous process of refinement over time. Whilst the langoustine taco has become iconic for good reason, there were many dishes that perhaps even exceeded it in a recent meal there. The snacks at the beginning are magical, and other highlights included the girasol – a brilliant play on guacamole that uses courgette in lieu of avocado to create an ice cream that sits beneath sunflower chokes and caviar; and the chilmole, which combines pineapple tomato, burnt chillies, blackberry and anise hyssop to create an electric but exquisite sonata.
By connecting with Mexico’s ancient culinary traditions and creatively adapting to their local environments, all three chefs are forging a path for Mexican cuisine that is poised to keep making strides. As Lastra puts it, their efforts reflect ‘a long process of trying to find this magic formula between tradition and innovation to build food for the future.’
